Ahram Weekly

Memorial ceremony

Memorial ceremony

Al-Ahram Weekly

PEOPLE lay flowers at a memorial ceremony at Sergels Torg plaza in the Swedish capital Stockholm close to the point where a truck drove into a department store. The Stockholm blast came soon after bomb blasts in two underground stations in Russia’s second largest city St Petersburg.

Stockholm and St Petersburg are the latest of a series of terrorist attacks across Europe and in both cities the terrorists were ethnic Ukbek from both Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, both former Soviet Union republics in the predominantly Muslim Central Asia.

The so-called Islamic State has many ethnic Uzbek recruits, more than any other Central Asian nation. Many ethnic Uzbek fought in Afghanistan against Soviet occupation, and the country itself has a large ethnic Uzbek community who are Afghan nationals.